Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices
tal@lemmy.today 7 hours agoIt’s a compressed RAM drive being used as swap backing. The kernel’s already got the functionality to have multiple tiers of priority for storage; this just leverages that.
Kinda like RAM Doubler of yesteryear.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 2 hours ago
Zram on Linux is awesome! I’ve used it heavily in both memory constrained systems and systems with 16+GB of memory running very poorly optimized code
Running for example, Cities Skylines with 40GB of mods can easily lead to running memory usage being 20-30GB uncompressed. With zram I can load that same mod load out on a 16GB laptop with no swap and it won’t crash where it would crash for being out of memory before.
Another example is Proxmox with over-provisioned lxc containers. Since it’s still the kernel scheduler running all of the processes in those containers zram can keep them all running nicely even when a heavily modded Minecraft server gets a few players online and starts pushing past memory limits, where before I set it up I’d have some of the Minecraft server processes get killed to free up memory resources without warning or proper logging by Minecraft
tal@lemmy.today 50 minutes ago
Thanks for the added insights! I haven’t used it myself, so appreciated.
Linux has a second, similar “compressed memory” feature called zswap. This guy has used both, and thinks that if someone is using a system with NVMe, that zswap is preferable.
linuxblog.io/zswap-better-than-zram/
Based on his take, zram is probably a better choice for that rotational-disk Celeron, but if you’re running Cities: Skylines on newer hardware, I’m wondering if zswap might be more advantageous.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 34 minutes ago
Huh I’d never looked into that! Thank you!
I mostly used zram because there’s an easy-peasy script in the Debian repos making it dead simple to setup and never looked deeper into it